Imagine yourself sitting down for the evening under a cozy blanket with a good book. As you read, the branch brushing the window outside catches your attention. A creak from the other room becomes sinister. Is it the house settling? Or is it a killer, sneaking up behind you?
These six scary thriller books will make you want to read with ALL the lights on!
How to Sell a Haunted House
Why did their parents flee their home in the middle of the night? What had them in such a rush that they were killed instantly in a car crash? In How To Sell a Haunted House, that’s what Louise and Mark Joyner want to know. The estranged siblings lost their parents in an instant, but nothing has prepared them for their next task- selling a haunted house.
Their mother collected puppets, and the house is filled to the brim with the dolls of their childhood. Each sibling is harboring a dark secret about one puppet in particular: Pupkin. He led them through their childhood, and seemed to take on a life of his own…but now he has a life of his own? Going through the house, Pupkin comes alive in a new and terrifying way. He doesn’t want the house to sell, and Mark and Louise start to realize that the only way to break away from their past might be to burn it all down.
The Return
In The Return, one girl from a close-knit group of friends goes missing. It is hard for the others to believe she’s really gone, but they try to move on with their lives. Then, she comes back out of nowhere—with no memory of where she’s been or what has happened.
The girls plan a celebration trip to a whimsical new hotel, but when they get there, they realize their friend isn’t the same as she was before. Things begin by being slightly off, and just grow creepier from there.
Theme Music
Theme Music is about Dixie, a girl whose entire family was butchered by her father when she was just a baby. She moves in with her aunt, uncle, and cousin, and tries to live a life where she wasn’t “Baby Blue”—the only survivor of a horrible massacre. When her family's old house is put up for sale, she feels drawn to it immediately and decides to buy it. She begins to obsess over her past and uses the furniture her uncle kept to recreate the house as it was in the past.
Then, creepy things start happening. Items are inexplicably moved around. Dixie hears strange noises and sees the ghosts of her dead family in the house. When she reconnects with people from the past, Dixie begins to believe that the house is haunted. She learns that everything may not be as she thought, and maybe her father wasn’t responsible for the murders so many years ago.
Lock Every Door
Lock Every Door is about an apartment sitter, Jules, who finds herself in a situation too good to be true. She is offered a job that makes $12,000 for just three months. All she has to do is make an apartment seem occupied. But not everything is as it seems. The apartment complex, The Bartholomew, has many strict rules and strange residents.
After a fellow apartment sitter, Ingrid, disappears, Jules looks into The Bartholomew’s past and finds some suspicious things. Then, she realizes Ingrid isn’t the first person who has disappeared in The Bartholomew, and something much more sinister is going on.
The Sun Down Motel
The Sun Down Motel is told in dual timelines, Viv in the past and Carly in the present. In the past, Viv works for the Sun Down Motel and strange things start happening. She looks into recent murders and thinks she may be starting to find answers. In the present, Carly comes to the Sun Down Motel seeking answers about her aunt Viv. Viv disappeared 35 years before and Carly thinks she might be able to find out what happened.
Carly ends up getting a job at the Sun Down Motel, moves into the same apartment her aunt had lived in, and begins digging for secrets. In the past and present, information about the haunted hotel begins coming to light and both Viv and Carly experience the paranormal.
The Nightmare Man
The Nightmare Man is a chilling horror about a creepy book that comes to life. Ben Bookman is a best-selling horror author, similar to Stephen King, and heir to the Blackwood estate, a creepy mansion with a chilling history. Ben spends a weekend at Blackwood where he writes his new book, The Scarecrow. Soon after, the story starts to unfold in real life.
Meanwhile, Detective Mills arrives at the scene and finds a murdered family bundled inside cocoons and hung from the rafters, which is right out of Bookman's newest book. Then another family is killed and another person kills himself in front of Ben at a book signing, and things just get weird from there. Ben is the prime suspect, as he can’t remember what happened the night he wrote the book, so he starts to dig into Blackwood’s history—only to find he may have released something evil trapped years ago.
